Ornithology

The museum’s bird collection (more than 190,000 specimens) is the third-largest university-based
collection in the world (behind Harvard and the University of Michigan).

The museum’s holdings of birds from Peru, Bolivia, the West Indies, and the Southeastern
United States are the largest in the world, and the collection is among the largest
in the world from Borneo, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama,
and Argentina. The collection contains 160,000 skins, 22,000 complete skeletons, 8,000 fluid-preserved
specimens, and 12,000 stomach-content samples.

Since 1978, more than 300 research publications (including 25 books) have been based
wholly, or in part, on bird specimens in the LSU Museum of Natural Science. Several
graduates of the LSU ornithology program have been presidents of leading North American
scientific societies. Recent graduates of the LSU graduate program in ornithology
are currently the research curators of some of the largest and most important bird
collections in the world: the Smithsonian, the Field Museum of Natural History in
Chicago, the Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas, the Bell Museum of
Natural History at the University of Minnesota, and the Goeldi Museum in Brazil.

LSU ornithologists are the world’s experts on birds from several Latin American regions,
including Peru and Bolivia, which together contain more species of birds than any
other similar-sized region in the world. LSU is the only university museum in the
world that has conducted ornithological field research in South America every year
since 1962.